«В этих картинах мы видим, конечно же, рассказанное на разные лады сотворение мира с чистого белого листа — это длительное движение какого-то мифологического змея-прародителя, выписывающего кольца и оставляющего следы от их сокращений»
Павел Герасименко арт-критик
... In these pictures we see, described on many levels of course, the creation of the world from a blanksheet - it is the long movement of a mythological serpent-ancestor forming circular shapes and leaving traces from their retraction. It is as if Vlad Kulkov (it is both funny and strange that his name is the title of the supreme deity of the Maya, the feathered serpent Kukulkan) deconstructs the mythology, reducing the Mayan deity to a snake and a bird and depicting everything on the canvas. But this is only an image, conveying an impression of Kulkov’s work associated with the fact that in the paintings hanging on the walls there remains a powerful energy of action and movement, which is transmitted to the viewer.
Pavel Gerasimenko, Arterritory, 28 March 2012
Vlad Kulkov is a young artist who is consistently elaborating the tradition of an abstract expressionism. Such an appeal to tradition is characteristic of a modern culture that has transformed Nietzsche’s “eternal return” into the idea of cultural pluralism. Kulkov is finding his path, manifesting the return not through anexternal similarity with some or other historical material, but through his "language" of descrip-tion... Completing his "Journey to the World of Images," Kulkov balances between abstraction and recognizable images, in the process leaving biomorphic "fingerprints"; fanciful masks and faces. His images are generated by what André Breton once called pure psychic automatism.
Language plays the main role in Kulkov’s latest project. The exhibition's title is borrowed from the name of the artist in an article by Jacques Derrida, “Cogita and the History of Madness”, dedicated to a book by Michel Foucault. In this text Derrida demonstrates the contradiction of Foucault’s conception in describing madness with the language of reason, to which it is opposed. The artist took the book by Jacques Derrida "Writing and Difference” to Mexico, where he went to study indigenous traditional culture. The fabric of the text, a woven linguistic space is further woven into the world of images of the ancient calendar rituals and random pareidolia recognized by the artist in Mexican caves. We can say that by referring to abstract expressionism using the hieroglyphic signs of the ancient Indians, the history of madness and deconstruction, the artist rejects Cogita’s modernism giving rise to a conception of the language of painting. Going round in circles, he again describes these “spinning powers of imprudence” around Cogita.
Olesya Turkina
